ARTICLES ABOUT ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE BY DATE - PAGE 2

After years of endless-seeming work and little sleep, Muyiwa Jaiyeola, 33, shares these tips on surviving two jobs: Never watch the clock. Don't ever miss any buses. Lost travel time means lost sleep. And keep reminding yourself that you will catch up on sleep on weekends, and that you have to keep going to earn money to pay the bills. When Jaiyeola pulled two all-night shifts at his stockroom job last week, for example, that meant sleeping two hours in the afternoon after leaving Sears, and then two more in the morning before going back to his salesman's job. He hoped to nap during his break in the middle of the night.

The nation has gone through a jobless recovery. Now it is introducing another puzzling economic trend: the downward upturn. In other words, it was another day of mixed signals for an economy that is moving forward, but not at the pace most people would like to see. A day after retailers reported their best monthly sales in more than a year, the Labor Department released job statistics on Friday that were both encouraging and disappointing, ...

Long-term joblessness helped to distinguish the most recent recession, especially for women. According to a new report, women represented 43 percent of the nation's long-term unemployed--those out of work but still actively seeking employment for 27 weeks or longer--from 2001-2004. That's up from 35 percent in 1990-1993. Both time periods include the nation's last two recessions and their recovery periods. Andrew Stettner, policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project in New York, which published the study with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, attributes the increase in female joblessness to the toll on female-dominated occupations.

By Derrick Z. Jackson, New York Times News Service, a syndicated columnist based in Boston | May 23, 2005

On statistics alone, it was ludicrous for President Vicente Fox of Mexico to say that Mexicans do the menial work in America "that not even blacks want to do." If Fox were to tool around our cities and rural regions he would discover that 26 percent of African-American men and 34 percent of African-American women worked at poverty-level wages in 2003, according to the "State of Working America, 2004-2005," published by the progressive Economic Policy Institute. That is not as stunning as the 36 percent of Latino men and the 46 percent of Latina women who work in poverty.

The economy continued its halting recovery last month, but it added fewer jobs than expected, disappointing those who were hoping for a more vigorous showing. The nation's unemployment rate dropped in January to 5.2 percent, the lowest level since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Labor Department reported Friday. It was 5.4 percent in December. But the improvement resulted from a smaller number of people looking for work rather than more people being hired. "The economy is not creating enough good paying jobs, causing workers to quit looking for jobs," warned Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland's business school.

Jamey Chapin is 23 and graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in December. Though her dream job would be to work in TV news, by the end of August she was applying for positions as varied as pharmaceutical sales and financial advising. "I've been looking since January, and at this point I'm open to just about anything," says Chapin, who studied communication arts. For those entry-level positions, she'll compete with not only her class, but also with many of the 1.6 million 20- to 24-year-olds that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says are currently unemployed.

Jamey Chapin is 23 and graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in December. Though her dream job would be to work in TV news, by the end of August she was applying for positions as varied as pharmaceutical sales and financial advising. "I've been looking since January, and at this point I'm open to just about anything," says Chapin, who studied communication arts. For those entry-level positions, she'll compete with not only her class, but also with many of the 1.6 million 20- to 24-year-olds that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says are currently unemployed.

Uncertain and uneven--that's how today's job market looks. Though employers added 144,000 jobs in August, the labor force shrank by 152,000 people--offsetting the good news, according to the U.S. Labor Department's household survey. Though the unemployment rate dipped to 5.4 percent from 5.5 percent in July, companies are still hesitant to bulk up payrolls as aggressively as they have in some previous economic recoveries. Long-term unemployment is a growing problem, according to a report issued Saturday by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, a liberal-leaning think tank.

Keith Schneider, a 36-year-old freelance pipe fitter from South Toledo, Ohio, picked up his newspaper April 3 and read that the U.S. economy added 308,000 jobs in March. He shook his head. "I just didn't know where these jobs could be," said Schneider, who often goes six weeks between jobs installing and repairing pipes at oil refineries and has seen his annual income fall to $40,000 from about $70,000 in the late 1990s. "They're sure not here." The U.S. has not replaced any of the 2.8 million factory jobs lost since President Bush took office in 2001, forcing many workers to accept lower-paying alternatives.

Despite strong signs of recovery in the U.S. economy, the Labor Department reported Friday that employers added only 1,000 jobs in December, far fewer than economists had predicted. The agency also revised earlier estimates of job growth for November and October, saying the economy created 51,000 fewer jobs during those months than originally thought. The one bright spot in the report was that the unemployment rate dropped to 5.7 percent from 5.9 percent during the month, but even that news carried a taint.